TMZ in particular is otm and ahead of the curve way too often to be dismissed
Didn't get into Joni until a few years ago and that track was my way in. (Well probably more so that I was dating a huge Joanna Newsome stan and like a pass-aggressive tool decided to undercut via Joni, but that track was one of the few reference points I had that wasn't a sterile James Blake cover, a Velvet Rope sample or Help Me, which at the time I didn't know was by her.)
But that cover man, pure gospel. Been making a playlist of songs working with that church aesthetic without being beholden to it and that was one of the first thing that came to mind. The range of things he could assimilate whilst remaining so effortlessly true was mind-boggling. The irony is, to me who was born in the 90's and didn't really get to experience him as a vital artist outside the odd time Diamonds and Pearls or The Most Beautiful Girl was on mtv, he never quite felt real; like, how could this guy exist?
― tsrobodo, Friday, 22 April 2016 01:16 (eight years ago) link
I still remember my mom buying me the "Batdance" single.
Vicki ValeVick-vicki Vale
Yo Jackie...let me stick the seven inch in the computer
― Neanderthal, Friday, 22 April 2016 01:18 (eight years ago) link
on "Head" now.
"I think you like to go downYou wouldn't have stoppedBut I, I came on your wedding gown"
man I'm gonna miss him for lines like this.....
― Neanderthal, Friday, 22 April 2016 01:19 (eight years ago) link
home now. listening to a 2-CD boot of a 1988 show, "live in dortmund." amazing. amazing. amazing.
check this set list: http://www.setlist.fm/setlist/prince/1988/westfalenhalle-1-dortmund-germany-63d856bb.html
― wizzz! (amateurist), Friday, 22 April 2016 01:24 (eight years ago) link
omg
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XODMwMDY2ODQ=.html
thank christ for sketchy chinese video streaming sites.
― wizzz! (amateurist), Friday, 22 April 2016 01:28 (eight years ago) link
opening with Erotic City, damn nice
― Neanderthal, Friday, 22 April 2016 01:30 (eight years ago) link
So after feeling curiously non-gutted most of the day (I'm guessing because I've spend most of the day listening to Prince, and his music makes me happy), I finally lost it when my husband showed me this photo:
http://media.gettyimages.com/photos/musician-prince-and-actress-eva-longoria-watch-the-2007-nba-all-star-picture-id73364583
Maybe it's because I've been looking at older stuff all day, and here is looking happy in a (relatively) recent photo, but...wow.
― rhymes with "blondie blast" (cryptosicko), Friday, 22 April 2016 02:03 (eight years ago) link
guys
play the second disc of Emancipation.
The string bit in "Soul Sanctuary" is killing me.
I've always loved the twosome of "The Holy River" and "Let's Have a Baby."
― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 22 April 2016 02:05 (eight years ago) link
the problem I'm having right now is as soon as I put anything on I'm already thinking an album ahead
― Neanderthal, Friday, 22 April 2016 02:06 (eight years ago) link
tho I'm on Sign O' the Times now and the guitar solo on "Play in the Sunshine" = fuuuuuuuuuuuck yea
guess you could say he had to gett off this mortal coil
― del griffith, Friday, 22 April 2016 02:10 (eight years ago) link
hey guys
― Neanderthal, Friday, 22 April 2016 02:10 (eight years ago) link
tell me
who on this board
― Neanderthal, Friday, 22 April 2016 02:11 (eight years ago) link
know about the QUAKE?
and I don't mean sexually satisfy to completion the members of musical group This Mortal Coil, but I wouldn't have put it past him
― del griffith, Friday, 22 April 2016 02:11 (eight years ago) link
if there's one thing we know about Prince, it's that he loved music. if there's two things we know, it's that he loved music and ejaculating.
― del griffith, Friday, 22 April 2016 02:13 (eight years ago) link
he sounds so great at his last show! and so funny. just a week ago. definitely didn't sound sick.
― scott seward, Friday, 22 April 2016 02:44 (eight years ago) link
Fuck
http://www.tmz.com/2016/04/21/prince-treated-drug-overdose-dead/
― flappy bird, Friday, 22 April 2016 02:50 (eight years ago) link
Heard a beautiful statement from a radio caller, which normally might not sit well with me but in this case I thought was totally appropriate. I'll paraphrase: We didn't lose Prince. He was a gift to us from God, and now he can be back with his creator, where he belongs, and one day, I hope to see him again.
This might be the toughest for me of all of these so far.
― Josh in Chicago, Friday, 22 April 2016 03:15 (eight years ago) link
rumored cause of death was opioid overdone; allegedly he was given a safety shot the other night and didn't have the flu. if I had to make wild guesses, it might be that he had a painkiller problem, probably to deal with his hips and knees which allegedly needed to be replaced ages ago but he never did due to JW prohibitions on blood transfusions. Notably he did just do a huge tour where he was sitting down most of the time.
― akm, Friday, 22 April 2016 04:04 (eight years ago) link
overdose, not overdone.
the problem I'm having right now is as soon as I put anything on I'm already thinking an album ahead― Neanderthal
― MatthewK, Friday, 22 April 2016 05:35 (eight years ago) link
i guess this is a weird thing to think but i feel bad that tuomas is probably asleep and doesn't know yet. hugs 2 u when you wake up tuomas.
― scarcity festival (Jon not Jon), 22. huhtikuuta 2016 1:04
Thank you for this, Jon. Yeah, I woke up to this news, and I can't really imagine any other musician whose death would be more shocking to me than his. Obviousky I was aware of his songs ever since childhood and liked them, but I didn't really delve into his music until in my 20s, and since then he has been one of the three popular musicians I've loved the most, alongside Nina Simone and Herbie Hancock. (You hang with us, Herbie!)
Regardless of what you think about Prince's image and politics, I think it's undeniable that he was a genius songwriter and musician, probably the biggest genius in pop music to have emerged in the last 40 years. But of course that image was a huge part of him too, and like people have said in this thread, he did a remarkable job in helping to break down rigid categories of living in the world, loosening rigid dichotomies such as gay/straight, black/white, man/woman.
I know that in his last years he said some nasty things to Wendy & Lisa (probably others too) about their sexuality, due to his Jehova's Witness faith, and I don't think that should be whitewashed either, it's an example how even the best of us can become bigoted. So fuck him for that, and fuck the JWs and any other religions that preach bigotry. But as a whole, I think his life and career and image in pop culture made being queer easier for countless people, so the positive still far outweighs the negative. Thank you for that, you sweet Prince.
I recently watched the episode of New Girl where he's the guest star, and even though it's not my favourite series, the way he emanates sexuality and mischief and (let's not forget that either) empathy for the broken ones was just awesome. I recommend watching that episode for all Prince fans and lovers, even if it was just fiction (though when it comes to pop stars, what isn't?), that's how I want to remember him.
― Tuomas, Friday, 22 April 2016 07:24 (eight years ago) link
i thought this was nice, from the guardian blog, by field music (who i never really listened to, but i might do now)
One of the things Prince does amazingly well – so well that no one really notices – is make songs that don’t have chords. Each instrument plays its own little thing and they come together to make the song, but there isn’t necessarily a piano or guitar leading you through a harmonic pattern. It means there’s a lot of space for little sonic touches and for off-the-chart singing and it keeps things nicely ambiguous. This song might be the most ambiguous of all: a chaste affair with a waitress that sounds like it might all be taking place under water until the phone rings or they turn the radio on to listen to Joni Mitchell. Weird and beautiful.
― StillAdvance, Friday, 22 April 2016 09:07 (eight years ago) link
i dont think i can listen to his music today. it will be too embarrassing at work.
― StillAdvance, Friday, 22 April 2016 09:16 (eight years ago) link
Arguments can and will be made that JW beliefs contributed greatly to his early death, Tomas, so he fucked himself and you don't have to.
― Three Word Username, Friday, 22 April 2016 10:23 (eight years ago) link
^^^ LOGIC.
― Matt DC, Friday, 22 April 2016 10:57 (eight years ago) link
do JWs not believe in receiving medical treatment?
― StillAdvance, Friday, 22 April 2016 11:00 (eight years ago) link
Blood transfusions.
― Three Word Username, Friday, 22 April 2016 11:01 (eight years ago) link
They don't believe in transfusions. Everything else is OK. xp
― jedi slimane (suzy), Friday, 22 April 2016 11:01 (eight years ago) link
fuck :( :( :(
― StillAdvance, Friday, 22 April 2016 11:04 (eight years ago) link
I admire your tenacity, Matt DC, even if absolutely nothing else about you whatsoever is admirable.
― Three Word Username, Friday, 22 April 2016 11:20 (eight years ago) link
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1159896994042718&id=162957660403328This just showed up in my fb feed as my bus is driving past Gallaudet.― how's life, Thursday, April 21, 2016 5:00 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
This just showed up in my fb feed as my bus is driving past Gallaudet.
― how's life, Thursday, April 21, 2016 5:00 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
Here's another post from them, with better pics.
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1058030807562671&id=162957660403328
https://scontent.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xtp1/v/t1.0-9/11825578_1058026347563117_5880469998232340446_n.jpg?oh=a1c640ae59fd28d66c81d6cf0156af75&oe=57B84844https://scontent.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/10403485_1058026357563116_6142523207009784325_n.jpg?oh=8670b8c3616ab58e4d57ed8981d89286&oe=5774BD20
― how's life, Friday, 22 April 2016 11:29 (eight years ago) link
bbc4 showing a prince docu tonight but its the wrong one (one of their 'we have schedule time to fill' cheapies) - they should be showing the omnibus docu from the 1990s.
― StillAdvance, Friday, 22 April 2016 11:31 (eight years ago) link
TWU - you realise that speculating on an artist's death and religion when we don't even know the reason yet and concluding "he fucked himself" is pretty dumb, right?
― Matt DC, Friday, 22 April 2016 11:31 (eight years ago) link
Sure. So's holding grudges against people you don't know over years.
That said, TMZ is reporting an overdose last week, that Prince has needed hip and knee replacement and not gotten it because of the JW prohibition on blood transfusion is common knowledge, so it's not that far to fetch. I was mostly about giving Tomas an out on cursing his favorite artist for religious beliefs -- I'm agnostic on the cause of death.
― Three Word Username, Friday, 22 April 2016 11:41 (eight years ago) link
Tthe crazies are already speculating that because Prince had a history with epilepsy he had an adverse reaction to a flu shot, which is bonkers, so I just want to wait for something closer to the truth to clear the air.
― Josh in Chicago, Friday, 22 April 2016 11:58 (eight years ago) link
for now I don't give a shit about the why, just leveled that it happened. we can dissect the reason for it, as we did with MJ, after the initial shock has worn off
― Neanderthal, Friday, 22 April 2016 11:59 (eight years ago) link
One of the things Prince does amazingly well – so well that no one really notices – is make songs that don’t have chords. Each instrument plays its own little thing and they come together to make the song, but there isn’t necessarily a piano or guitar leading you through a harmonic pattern.
Was listening to Sign O' The Times on the way to work this morning and thinking about exactly this. Like, "U Got The Look" is basically just a I-IV-V variation in B, but the guitar arrangement (until the solo and outro) is so sparse that it leaves room for so, so much. Same with the title track, or "Forever In My Life" and plenty of other tunes. It's this amazing combination of space and density.
― T.L.O.P.son (Phil D.), Friday, 22 April 2016 12:06 (eight years ago) link
The only thing that catches my attention - and I agree, this is such a huge shock I don't really want to speculate - is that Prince was so smart, so in control, so seemingly healthy and, afaik had no real relationship to addictive drugs, alcohol, even smoking (cigarettes). The guy was always fit like a master. I just can't believe that something as mundane as drugs did him in. MJ was clearly messed up on multiple levels, surrounded by sycophants and enablers and sketchy people. Everyone knew that. Prince was weird, but that was part of who he always was, not something he became, or something he and a huge army of handlers had to surmount. He wasn't isolated, but he was always in control, of his music, image, environment, everything.
― Josh in Chicago, Friday, 22 April 2016 12:09 (eight years ago) link
"When Doves Cry" barely has chords, right? And "Sign" has all sorts of novel experiments, from no chords, to VU chug, to Beatles pop, to hard funk, just finding his way around the possibilities of music.
― Josh in Chicago, Friday, 22 April 2016 12:10 (eight years ago) link
The irony is, to me who was born in the 90's and didn't really get to experience him as a vital artist outside the odd time Diamonds and Pearls or The Most Beautiful Girl was on mtv, he never quite felt real; like, how could this guy exist?
I was born in the 70s and he didn't seem real through his vital 80s! "Vital" is a word I've seen a lot in the past day. I think his vitality on stage is what makes it such a shock that he was ultimately as mortal as the rest of us.
1999 and Purple Rain were huge with me and my friends when we were teenagers. We grew up in a very much white guys with guitars world and I hope Prince managed to open our minds a tiny little bit to other possibilities.
I hadn't listened much to him in recent years (I bought Purple Rain on the train home last night as for some reason it had never made its way onto my ipod!) but like everyone else I assumed he was always going to be around making records and being Prince.
I like that two of the stories I've read of people meeting him and also one from a guy on BBC news last night all mentioned how good he smelled, that there are people all over the world going "I met Prince and he was awesome and funny and he smelled great!"
― punnerist spoon here (onimo), Friday, 22 April 2016 12:13 (eight years ago) link
"The only thing that catches my attention - and I agree, this is such a huge shock I don't really want to speculate - is that Prince was so smart, so in control..."
He was also a complete loon. The crackpots in my FB feed are posting this and also speculating that Sony and Warner Bros have assassinated him and Michael for pulling their stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwjefpNkuas&feature=youtu.be
― human and working on getting beer (longneck), Friday, 22 April 2016 12:14 (eight years ago) link
Not sure if it's been posted yet but I like this piece by Ned on the 30th anniversary of Purple Rain. It chimes strongly with me as Ned and I are the same age and Purple Rain seemed to hit him in the same way as it did me and my friends.
http://thequietus.com/articles/15259-prince-purple-rain-anniversary-review
― punnerist spoon here (onimo), Friday, 22 April 2016 12:18 (eight years ago) link
Reposting this from my FB because why not:
“People call me rudeI wish we all were nudeI wish there was no black and whiteI wish there were no rules”
“I’m not a womanI’m not a manI am something that you’ll never understand”
“Am I black or white?Am I straight or gay?”
In some ways, it’s easy to see Prince as representative of no one but himself. He was his own country, his own planet, orbiting a sun that was also him. (Baby, he’s a star.)
But he was also a heartland American, a black man from the white Midwest who was at home in a seemingly endless stream of cultural forms – funk, rock, R&B, pop, disco, folk, New Wave, psychedelia. He eventually stubbed his toe on hip-hop, but that was just the human exception to his superhuman rule. And even at that, he never really lost his balance.
The first album I heard was 1999. The first one I bought – the first album I ever bought by a nonwhite artist, as far as I can remember – was Purple Rain. I knew I needed it before it ever came out, because one night I was sitting at the kitchen table doing homework with the radio on and an electric snarl erupted from the speakers behind me. I dropped my pencil and just listened. Dig if you will a picture of a straight suburban Reagan-era white kid having his mind blown in real time.
Inside the LP sleeve was a promotional poster of Prince and the Revolution, in all their lace-and-pearled, multi-racial, multi-gendered splendor. I was bewitched, boggled and bewildered. I had no reference points for the existence of people who looked or acted like this, so confident in their bodies and cool in their collective. They didn’t just suggest an alternate reality, they manifested it on the page – and even more, in the music.
Segueing from the monstrous rock of “Let’s Go Crazy” (with its shamelessly shredded guitar climax, designed to make all my Rush-loving friends admit that, OK, that guy can play) to the spry, groovy come on of “Take Me With You,” with the dirty secrets of “Darling Nikki” buried at the end of side one, before the astounding quartet of Doves Cry-Die 4 U-Baby I’m a-Purple Rain on side two, it was (is!) a manifesto of liberation and revelation, satiation, salvation and resurrection, gobbledygook about purple bananas and computer blues, saturated in sex and religion and as confounding and exciting as either.
And it’s not even his best album.
(Probably. I don’t know. Don’t make me pick.)
Fluid by instinct, unlimited by instrument, genre, gender, race, sexuality or even his own name – who else would so casually throw away a name like Prince? – I’m sure he used whichever restroom he damn well felt like.
So much more to say, so many songs and moments, the Purple Rain and Lovesexy concerts I saw, the samizdat thrill of scoring a muddy cassette dub of the Black Album from a Manhattan street vendor, the confused and endearing politics (and maybe prophetic too – Ronnie did talk to Russia), the eventual enduring sense of him as a national trickster, popping up on rooftops, in jazz clubs, at the Super Bowl, playing music for no reason except that nothing made him happier and no one did it better.
He enacted a world (of never ending happiness), and inside it he made room for everyone. White, black, Puerto Rican, everybody just a-freakin'. Let's go uptown, let's go crazy, let's pretend we're married, go all night.
― A nationally known air show announcer/personality (tipsy mothra), Friday, 22 April 2016 12:20 (eight years ago) link
Was listening to Sign O' The Times on the way to work this morning and thinking about exactly this. Like, "U Got The Look" is basically just a I-IV-V variation in B, but the guitar arrangement (until the solo and outro) is so sparse that it leaves room for so, so much
man I had the same thought driving into work this mornin listening to "U Got the Look," i.e. "What is going on here? It's so damn spare."
― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 22 April 2016 12:32 (eight years ago) link
he irony is, to me who was born in the 90's and didn't really get to experience him as a vital artist outside the odd time Diamonds and Pearls or The Most Beautiful Girl was on mtv, he never quite felt real; like, how could this guy exist?
A student at our uni radio station who interviewed me admitted she was born in 1994, the same year as Prince's last top five smash, and knew Prince because her dad would explain the passages "that sounded like jazz" and from summer road trips.
― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 22 April 2016 12:33 (eight years ago) link
"When Doves Cry" does have chords, but they're implied rather than performed.
― Mark G, Friday, 22 April 2016 13:00 (eight years ago) link
Oh, and until someone says otherwise, I'm assuming pneumonia.
― Mark G, Friday, 22 April 2016 13:01 (eight years ago) link